Monthly Archives: June 2009

I spoke to my friend, Rev. Candy Holmes, yesterday as she and her partner, Rev. Elder Darlene Garner, and Rev. Elder Troy Perry and his partner, Phillip DeBlieck, were leaving the White House. They were part of the several hundred LGBT leaders invited to a reception with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to celebrate Gay Pride Month.

I know the President is committed to liberation.

In that spirit, I ask him to do one thing: suspend Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), for one year and ask Congress to send him a bill to overturn it in that time. He can do that because of wartime necessity. We need all the soldiers who are willing to help in Afghanistan and Iraq that we can find.

As LGBT folks prepare to celebrate sexual integrity as manifested at Stonewall, another politician is caught in sexual hyprocisy.

Governor Mark Sanford

Of course, Governor Sanford of South Carolina is not alone in trying to have it both ways. Senators get caught, other governors, too. I remember when the somewhat elderly Chair of the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee–a real powerhouse in Congress–was brought down by his escapades in a fountain with an exotic dancer.

And it is not just straight folks, right? LGBT people have affairs, too.

But it is the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou attitude that leads to the irony: as a member of the U.S. House, Governor Sanford voted to impeach President Clinton because he broke his promise to Hillary.

The morality is pretty simple, whether you are Governor or locked up in jail, a millionaire or a pauper, straight or gay, Democrat or Republican, of any or no religion: don’t do something that hurts someone you love.

And, if you do, get on your knees right away, confess, ask for forgiveness, and let God change your life.

For several summers I was able to live, with my daughters and my lover and his daughter, in a simple but comfortable cabin on a small lake in Maine. The scenery was definitely like the movie, “On Golden Pond,” although this lake was called Georges Pond.

I am very grateful to my lover at the time, Marvin Ellison, for those summers, as well as for the more than six years we spent together, and for his continuing friendship.

The memory of the loons on Georges Pond can still bring me to tears. I can see them gliding silently across the water, and then diving only to reappear hundreds of yards away. Most of all I hear their haunting call.

The expression, “crazy like a loon,” comes from the antics they use if they think predators are getting too close. They fiercely protect their young. Loons are among the oldest creatures still in existence, and they evoke deep spiritual connection for me.

That is why it means so much to me that my youngest daughter, Robin, sent me a Father’s Day card with loons on the front. She too remembers the loons, and the wonderful time we shared with them.

President Obama talked yestereday to teens and others about how important it is to be a good father. He appears to be a good one himself, even though his was absent, someone who was “a myth to me, both more and less than a man.”

I loved my father. But I have spent much of my life dealing with pain about him–that he seemed to love his other son, the one who was born and died before I ever appeared, more than me.

It is only lately, long after my father died, that I have come to realize that despite his shortcomings, he not only cared for me but also he passed on many good things to me.

I am a father, too. I believe my daughters know, despite my shortcomings, how much I love them.

Having a difficult childhood, or other obstacle, may explain some of our challenges as parents, but none of it is a reason to fail as parents.

Being a parent–father or mother or grandparent or aunt or uncle or family friend or older sibling or foster parent or any of the other ways we parent–is the most important job in the world.

Today is Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This is the date, in 1865, on which Major General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, TX, with the news the Civil War had ended and the enslaved were now free–more than 2 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Sadly, other kinds of slavery continue.

Ugly profiteers still enslave women and children around the world to sell their bodies, and customers, like slaveowners of old, still buy.

Others of us are slaves to addictions–alcohol, drugs, food, sex, money, work. We enslaved, not by others, but by our own disease.

On this day to celebrate deliverance, I pray for an end to all forms of slavery.

And I remember that although those who were enslaved in the South were freed after the Civil War, they and their descendants still had a long struggle to be truly free (and the struggle continues today).

The march for freedom does not end. God calls each of us to join the Freedom Train–to keep it running, to bring more on board, to share in the hope and joy of liberation for all.